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Radical Atheists demand 9/11 museum censored [Darleen Click]

If these anti-theist bigots are successful, what stops them from challenging any Holocaust museum displaying menorahs or any art museum displaying any number of religious objects?

American Atheists on Thursday asked an appeals court in New York to remove the “miracle cross” from the 9/11 Museum, where it was placed two years ago. The steel beams were discovered in the devastation at Ground Zero.

Eric Baxster of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said that the cross is part of the story of 9/11 and that museums don’t censor history.

But the New York City atheists say the cross-shaped beams are a part of religious history in a museum that is on Port Authority property and financed by taxpayers. So they say this is a case of protecting the separation between church and state. […]

The newspaper said Judge Reena Raggi appeared skeptical of the claims by the atheist group.

“There are countless cases of museums including religious artifacts among their exhibits and it’s going to be described in a way that talks about the history of the object, what is the problem here?” she said. “An argument has been made that you are trying to censor history.”

The anti-theists remind me of offended Islamists who see blasphemy in ice cream swirls.

All of the left is like this. The “cause” is simply there to gain foot-soldiers and contributions. What is done to “advance” the “cause” is chosen only to advance an end which is the restoration of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled which was the lot of all mankind for thousands of years and still for many today.

The true spirit of the left is in this video which sdferr linked to me yesterday. Most of it is in English but you can have English subtitles on Youtube by clicking the CC button, then the arrow in the box that says Romanian, then the translate button and then select English.

Many of the questions raised here by this challenge are present in this recording and transcription of a lecture given in 1962 to a meeting of the Hillel Foundation chapter at Chicago University on the subject, “Why We Remain Jews”, and while those questions are dealt with in the specific aspect, they are enlarged in the more general human case as well.

Separation of Church and State isn’t in the Constitution. Instead, we have:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”

One might argue that in exhibiting that item, the Port Authority is attempting to legally establish Christianity. But one would be stupid for doing so; doubly so because the Port Authority is not Congress.

Worse Slart, the political left entirely misapprehends the intention in Jefferson’s dictum, since he thinks to severely limit the State from overreach into matters of religious conscience, which must be left alone to its opinions, and the political left thinks to enlarge the State precisely to interfere where it does not belong.

And I can’t for the life of me figure out how this cross is supposed to be an “establishment of religion” and thus something that Cannot Get Any Public Money Even Indirectly.

But then I usually think that about the hyperventilating of the Professional Capital-A-Atheist crowd.

(Turns out that even “religious history” is still “history” and, if presented not as Divine Providence or the like, but rather as “this is a thing that some people thought was of great significance”, is not remotely inappropriate for museum display, even with public funds.

Christ, these people would probably want a Gutenberg Bible removed from a History of Printing exhibit…)

Oh those dastardly Spanish Inquisitors! Snatching poor unwilling atheists from their comfy chairs and dragging them to the 9/11 musuem where they’re forced to prostrate themselves before the miracle cross and doused with holy water against their wills.

Oh the humanity! Won’t somebody do something to help the poor atheists?

Another example of conflating “freedom OF religion” and “freedom FROM religion”.
If they were to succeed in this suit, how long before they demand the removal of all crosses (and Star’s of David) used as headstones at national military cemeteries???

Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown frustrated with what she saw as the network’s liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network’s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.

At the same time, Attkisson’s own reporting on the Obama administration, which some staffers characterized as agenda-driven, had led network executives to doubt the impartiality of her reporting. She is currently at work on a book — tentatively titled “Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington” — which addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the Obama administration.

I wonder how long was left on her contract? Because I’m guessing that’s how long CBS paid her to stay off the air work on her book.

Human dignity can survive only if we commonly believe and commonly affirm that every single human being, at every stage of development, is a person made in God’s image and bearing the dignity that is the mark of God’s personal possession. The only adequate conception of human dignity rests upon the biblical teaching that such dignity is not a human achievement, but a gift.
…
If we are biological accidents — just another primate — why should any individual human life matter? And why should we respect an abstraction called human rights?

An interesting witness to the force of this question comes from the late philosopher Ronald Dworkin. In his last book, Religion without God, posthumously published, the unbelieving philosopher made an awkward admission — philosophical naturalism cannot bear the freight of establishing human rights. …

There is no secular ground that can support and defend human rights. Furthermore, there is no secular system that can adequately rank the claims to various rights that human beings present. Just look at our current situation. Demands for erotic liberty — the unrestrained right to full individual sexual expression, fulfillment, and legitimacy — now routinely trumps religious liberty.

Read the whole thing, of course, but the term that struck me when I heard it over the radio yesterday was “erotic liberty.”

“If it turns me on it’s who I am, and you can’t say anything against it,” pretty much.

If I may be permitted a reaction to the mere words “erotic liberty” (in contradistinction to a reaction to the thrust of Albert Mohler’s address as such [I have not read the whole thing, but none of it]), these words constitute a peculiar paradox, it seems to me, since in the most comprehensive sense we are not free beings in our relation to our desiring parts (and these desiring erotic parts, I do not believe, are certainly not restricted to sexual matters, no matter how low modern thinking may go about that), but we are captives, much more like slaves who find themselves utterly incapable of ridding themselves of their (natural) condition. Even or perhaps especially those who choose asceticism: for are they not ruled by this choice, which itself is born in their natural desires? Anyway, that particular combination ‘erotic liberty’ is kind of shocking to me, because it is so far from what we know of ourselves.

“….So you see, when one of your pet bought and paid for voting bloc demographics becaomes less important by the addition of a much larger bought and paid for voting bloc, whats a feckless viciously ungrateful political party to do? Why fuck the smaller group over of course. With immigration who needs steenking Unions“.

An interesting observation from Mr. Hanby on the day we are informed that Sharyl Attkisson has left CBS:

*** Our notion of a free press is shaped of course by our modern notion of freedom, which we can summarize more or less adequately as the ability to act without external restraint, a close cousin of the belief that ‘anything is possible.’ Now while it is true that the state does not restrict the press in any obvious sense (it hardly needs to), examples such as these cannot but raise the question of whether the contemporary press is free even by this standard. Would a reporter who grasps the full gravity of the Gosnell trial or same-sex marriage and who adopts a perspective critical of the zeitgeist be free to work in today’s newsroom? Would she be permitted to pursue these issues and their implications to their logical conclusions? ***

I guess that something like a step in the right direction to go from an empty assertion devoid of content to an accusation against a proposition the man doesn’t maintain, but, well . . . not much to your benefit, I’m thinking.

Speaking of the poor unions, James Taranto had an interesting riff on a couple of veterans of the class struggle sitting on the front porch of the old soldier’s home and complaining about Obama’s New Model Multicultural Army and the way it fights the identity group struggle.

I’m kind of tempted to read the linked pieces. Oh the existential angst of being a socialist-progressive-liberal-Democrat in the era of Obama!

*** G: General Students – All students are admitted. This course tells students exactly what they want to hear.
PG: Professorial Guidance Suggested – This course reinforces campus orthodoxy but in ways that students might not entirely expect. It is suggested that students consult with professors before enrolling.

PG-17-21: Professors Strongly Cautioned – Some material in this course may be inappropriate for those who have suffered frustration, disappointment, rudeness, rejection, or any sort of limitation on their ability to bend the world to their will.

R: Restricted – This course may directly call into question students’ opinions through hard-hitting analytical and empirical argumentation. Permission is required from the campus diversity coordinator and sexual health advisor.
NF&S: No freshmen and sophomores are admitted under any circumstances. No junior or senior is admitted without the consent of the professor, approval of the campus diversity coordinator and sexual health advisor, and a note from the student’s parents. Without regard for the shock or revulsion normal students are likely to experience, this course vigorously puts forward reasons and evidence in support of ideas that directly oppose the conventional wisdom.

Such a ratings system cannot be expected to guarantee students that they will never encounter a disturbing or distasteful thought. But its implementation would help complete the nationwide transformation, already well underway, of the liberal arts from an education for freedom to freedom from education. ***

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